Buster, busted

Whatever the strange sound I heard behind me the other day, one suggestive of a farmer pulling his work boot out of a mud hole, I knew it wasn’t good.

A mix of Boston terrier and sometimes holy terror, Buster has been with us seven months now. Our young kids love him. When they returned home after spending a week with their grandparents this summer, they burst through the front door, rushing past me to smother the dog with hugs and kisses. Desperate hitchhikers on the berm of a road watching cars speed past at dusk without getting even a glance never felt so ignored.

Yes, Dad, you clothe and feed us. But will you lick soda off the linoleum and not tell Mom we spilled it?

Yes, the kids ignored me. But on this day, there was no ignoring that sound. I turned to see Buster had vomited on the carpet. If the sound was strange, the color of the mess on the carpet was stranger, a gelatinous blend of brown, rust, orange and gray. When the kids decided they wanted a dog, I listed 409 reasons I didn’t. Now, I was reaching for the Formula 409 to begin the cleanup. Yippee!

As I sopped up Buster’s little present, I couldn’t figure out what he ate that caused him to vomit. Dry dog food, Milk-Bone and other colorless dog treats never made him sick in the past, nor would they account for the unusual color and consistency.

When my wife returned from work, she set her purse and work bag on the kitchen table. She looked at the large glass centerpiece with a glass-encased candle in its center, turned to us and asked, “Who ate all the candy corn from the centerpiece?”

My wife, the kids and I looked at each other and traded shrugs. Then we all looked at Buster, who was lying on his belly, head down between his paws, and peering up through his eyebrows, guilty as O.J.

Somehow, our candy thief was able to get on top of the table, wedge his snout down far enough into the narrow, foot-deep centerpiece and lap up nearly an entire bag of Brach’s candy corn, which my wife had sprinkled in as an autumnal decoration.

And now he decided to give it back.

It had been 25 years since I last had a dog; I’d forgotten you can’t leave even a crumb of food remotely within its reach. A dog, as I was quickly reminded, will find a way to tightrope across a 40-foot gorge in a windstorm for a stale Ritz cracker.

I’d forgotten how having a dog was like having another child; we installed a child-proof lock on the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink to prevent him from getting in there and pulling out the trash basket.

We’ve even learned if we don’t close the doors to all the bedrooms and bathrooms before we leave the house, we’ll return to find Buster has dragged everything out of our waste baskets and sprinkled the trash throughout the house. Is he a dog or a disgruntled employee for Waste Management in disguise?

I should be thankful Buster has a taste for candy and used tissues rather than for chewing up more expensive items, like a Valentino pump, which a friend’s dog did to his wife’s shoe.